Healthcare fraud is a sizeable and significant challenge for the healthcare and insurance industries, and costs these industries billions of dollars each year. Healthcare fraud is a significant threat to most healthcare programs, such as government sponsored programs and private programs. Currently, healthcare providers, such as doctors, pharmacies, hospitals, etc., provide healthcare services to beneficiaries, and submit healthcare claims for the provision of such services. The healthcare claims are provided to a clearinghouse that makes minor edits to the claims, and provides the edited claims to a claims processor. The claims processor, in turn, processes, edits, and/or pays the healthcare claims. The clearinghouse and/or the claims processor may be associated with one or more private or public health insurers and/or other healthcare entities.
After paying the healthcare claims, the claims processor forwards the paid claims to a zone program integrity contractor. The zone program integrity contractor reviews the paid claims to determine whether any of the paid claims are fraudulent. A recovery audit contractor may also review the paid claims to determine whether any of them are fraudulent. In one example, the paid claims may be reviewed against a black list of suspect healthcare providers. If the zone program integrity contractor or the recovery audit contractor discovers a fraudulent healthcare claim, they may attempt to recover the monies paid for the fraudulent healthcare claim. However, such after-the-fact recovery methods (e.g., pay and chase methods) are typically unsuccessful since an entity committing the fraud may be difficult to locate due to the fact that the entity may not be a legitimate person, organization, business, etc. Furthermore, relying on law enforcement agencies to track down and prosecute such fraudulent entities may prove fruitless since law enforcement agencies lack the resources to handle healthcare fraud and it may require a long period of time to build a case against the fraudulent entities.